Martina Anderson Motion 142
Published: 1 March, 2008
Martina Anderson is the MLA for Foyle and party spokesperson on Equality and Human Rights, She is leading the 'Stand Up for Derry' campaign and speaking in favour of motion 142.
Sinn Féin launched the Stand Up For Derry campaign last year with the aim of uniting opinion around the needs of the North West.
And those needs are stark
Derry is a city where 34 percent of children are living in poverty. It has a huge proportion of teenage pregnancies and young people leaving school without any qualifications.
Long-term unemployment is endemic; there is a chronic shortage of social housing and a lack of hope for many people.
However, I do not believe any of this is an accident - quite the opposite.
The system has worked damn hard to keep the people of Derry down.
Derry is an overwhelmingly nationalist city, a city which witnessed a popular uprising in 1968.
Back then the people of Derry rose up off their knees and when the system couldn't defeat us on the streets they tried to defeat us by stealth.
They couldn't defeat us at Duke Street. They couldn't defeat us at the Battle of the Bogside. And they couldn't defeat us when they murdered 14 people at Bloody Sunday.
So they tried to break us by other means.
They have starved our city of resources - starved it of investment. They sought to keep our people in a state of abject poverty because they believed that we would be more concerned about our hungry bellies than pursuing the revolution that was playing out on the streets of our town.
Clearly, they underestimated us.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights movement but not enough has changed in the past four decades. Unemployment is still a way of life for many. Overcrowding, poor housing and generational poverty are as much a reality now as they were in 1968.
That is the legacy of a deliberate policy of neglect - aided and abetted by the SDLP - a party which felt the solution to Derry's woes was not to challenge the British, but to sell Derry as a cheap labour economy.
Well, the times are a - changing.
Sinn Féin is now the dominant party in the North and - unlike the SDLP - we are not prepared to accept crumbs - not for Derry or elsewhere. Our campaign is about standing up for everyone who has been ignored, sidelined and neglected.
So let's stand up for Derry. Let's Stand up for Donegal. Let's stand up for Belfast and Dublin and Cork. Let's Stand up for the struggle.
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